Imagine, Explore, Create

Friday, 23 October 2015

Grade 3 & 4 Students Vote!

On Thursday October 15th our grades 3 and 4 students participated in their first ever Student Vote sponsored by CIVIX, which is a "non-partisan registered charity building the skills and habits of citizenship within young Canadians." In the days leading up to Student Vote Day, the students explored concepts such as democracy, rights and responsibilities, levels of government, political parties and the voting process.

VOTE DAY

Student Vote connects with the grade 3 & 4 Social Studies curriculum in a variety of ways including; quality of life, selection of leaders, public service, group decision making, goods and services, natural resources, and it was a natural connection for our grade 4 students who had just returned from a week at City Hall School. In preparation for the vote, students engaged in complex questions such as:

What responsibilities come with our rights?

How is voting both a right and a responsibility?

How does a person make a decision about who to vote for?

How is my life affected by government?

After making their identification badges and learning how to correctly mark a ballot, our grade four Poll Clerks and Deputy Returning Officers supervised the votes. Students stepped behind real Elections Canada voting booths with ballots containing the names of the candidates in our Douglasdale, Shepard riding and cast their votes into actual Elections Canada voting boxes. At the end of our exciting day the votes were counted and reported to Student Vote in Ottawa.

THE RESULTS ARE IN

This year over 850,000 students across Canada cast votes from over 6000 schools. With over half of all schools in the country participating, this was the largest Student Vote event to date! On the evening of the federal election, after the closing of the polls, the Student Vote numbers were released.

Here are the National Student Vote results:

Liberal Party - 37% of the popular vote with 223 seats

Conservative Party - 26% of the popular vote with 69 seats

NDP - 20% of the popular vote with 40 seats

Green Party - 12% of the popular vote with 4 seats

Bloc Québécois - 1 seat

Here are the Douglasdale Student Vote results:

Conservative Party - 39.58%

Green Party - 31.25%

Liberal Party - 18.75%

NDP - 10.42%

A complete list of the Student Vote results broken down by country, province, city and school can be found at http://www.studentvote.ca/results/home/national_results/7